On 20th February 2017, A Cabinet meeting held at the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers in Singha Durbar announced the date of Local Elections to be held on May 14. Nearly after the 20 years, this election is being held. The last local elections in Nepal were held in 1997 for municipalities and village councils. And, Local elections which was held in 2005 by King Gyanendra during his direct rule which was widely boycotted by the major political parties. That was ineffective because of the ongoing civil war.

Election Commission Nepal is responsible government body for conducting and managing all activities of Local Elections. This is the first election after Nepal being recognized as a Federal Nation. For the preparation of the election, the government decided to provide Rs 10.296 billion to the Election Commission Nepal immediately for the polls. Thus, Election Commission Nepal has already started exploring the logistic requirements, updating the voters’ list, estimation of the human resources. According to the Election Commission Nepal, the preparation has been 90% completed. Commission had also received the financial and technical support from the major donor countries, who did support in past elections regularly.

The Commission had already started to generate an enormous amount of election data so, to maximize the reach of those data, last week in collaboration with Open Knowledge Nepal,we launched the first Beta version of Election Nepal Portal. Election Nepal is a crowdsourced open portal that brings all kind of Data related to Nepal’s Local Election together in Open and Visual Format. Those accumulated data can be easily reused in future for various purposes. The portal will be focusing on three different areas, such as: visualization, datasets, and Twitter feed. Visualization will consist different kinds of visualization which can be easily shared, reuse and embed. Datasets will consist data published by different government source regarding the election in an open format and Twitter feed will bring social buzz happening at social media regarding local elections.

For more information please visit the project website: http://electionnepal.org and find out how the project started and journey behind from here.